IV

You speak of Oriental mystery, of Oriental romance.

Are we Asians then like Molière’s bourgeois who spoke prose all his

life without knowing it? Is there really a veil of mystery about us?

No, no. The Most High God did not take the trouble to create two

different types of human beings, one to work on the banks of the

Seine, and the other to sing His praises on the shore of the Ganges.

There is no veil, no mystery, no romance … except the veil of

Christian ignorance, the romance of Christian imagination, the mystery

of Christian want of desire to know.

There is perhaps a latent search after knowledge and truth in your

hearts’ souls. But your inborn selfishness forces you to believe that

a healthy portion of ignorance is the best medicine against the

ravages of the dangerous malady which is called Tolerance. Just a

little effort would teach you that there is no mystery about us, no

abyss which separates you from us. But your ignorance is your bliss

and provides you with a sort of righteous bias. It also sheds a holy

and therefore eminently Christian halo around your attitude of

meddlesome interference in the affairs of Asia and North Africa. Of

course you only interfere because of your laudable intention to show

us the true path to civilization and salvation. And if accidentally

you increase your own power and wealth, if you impoverish the native

whom you attempt to “save,” if you incite strife where no strife

existed before you imported soldiers and bibles and missionaries and

whisky and some special brands of “white” diseases … well … Allah

is Great….

The mystery which is supposed to shroud the Orient is a lying

invention of Christendom destined to give a semblance of justice to

your selfish, harmful meddlings in the affairs, religions, politics

and customs of other countries.

If you wish to conquer with the right of fire and the might of sword,

go ahead and do so, or at least say so. It would be a motive which we

Muslim, being warriors, could understand and appreciate. But do not

clothe your greed for riches and dominion in the hypocritical, nasal,

sing-song of a heaven-decreed Mission to enlighten the poor native, a

Pharisee call of duty to spread the word of your Saviour, your lying

intention to uplift the ignorant Pagan.

Drop your mask of consummate beatitude in the contemplation of the

spiritual joys, the Christian and therefore very sanitary plumbing you

are endeavoring to confer upon us. Stop being liars and hypocrites:

and you will cease being what you are to-day:

The most hated and the most despised men in the length and breadth of

Asia and North Africa.

And I am not exaggerating. I am really putting it mildly so as not to

hurt your feelings.

Let me point out just one instance: the Young Turk Revolution.

You, the apostles of freedom and constitutional government and half a

dozen assorted fetishes, what was your attitude then?

You allowed Austria, your trusted steward of other people’s property

since the Berlin Congress of Thieves, to steal this property, the

fertile provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You looked on calmly

while the Bulgar mountebank annexed Turkish territory in time of

peace. You passed resolutions, full of blatant Christian hypocrisy and

Christian lies; but you never raised a finger in our behalf, in behalf

of that justice and humanity which you proudly claim as your

caste-right. The whole affair was a piece of brigandage, carried on

under the much-patched cloak of that whining cant which has made

modern Christianity an ugly by-word in Asia and North Africa.

You united in your endeavors to establish an independent and

constitutionally governed Roumania, a free Servia, a modern Greece and

Bulgaria, and, more recently, an autonomous Macedonia, under the

pretext that Turkey, being controlled with an iron rod by a despotic

Sultan and an intolerably exalted Sheykh-ul-Islam, was not fit to

govern Christian races.

But you obstruct Mohammedan Turkey’s efforts to introduce and enforce

the very principles of liberty and popular government which in former

years you had been advocating as a _sine qua non_ in the

administration of your precious Christian protégés.

An ounce of baptismal water makes such a difference, does it not?

I believe that I am the mouthpiece of a great majority of my

fellow-Muslim and my fellow-Asians when I state that the Jesuit policy

of Europe during the political travail of Young Turkey, when the

Osmanli attempted to crystallize his newly found liberty, will do more

to fan the red embers of fighting Pan-Islam into living, leaping

flames than any other political event since the Berlin treaty.

We have suffered long enough a series of deliberate moral insults and

material injuries at the hands of selfish, canting, lying

Christianity, and we are still capable of tremendous energies when

Islam is in danger.

And who can deny that Islam is in danger?

Your attitude during the Balkan troubles proved to us that the liberty

which you deem necessary to the Christian Balkans is a negligible

quantity when applied to the followers of the Prophet Mohammed who

inhabit the same peninsula.

And I could mention a dozen instances to prove that you yourselves are

forcing on the world the coming struggle between Asia, all Asia,

against Europe and America, against Christendom, in other words.

You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy

War, a gigantic Day of Reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and

Tamerlane … who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and

spears.

You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be

taught with the whirling swish of the sword when it is red.

V

You claim that altruism and the virtues are the monopoly of your creed

and your race.

But in reality the teachings of Jesus are not a particle more apt to

lead his followers in the golden path than are the sayings of the Lord

Buddha, the laws of Moses, the wisdom of Confucius, or the words of

the Koran. True tolerance, true altruism teaches us that what is right

in Peking may be wrong on the shores of Lake Tchaad, and what is wrong

in a Damascus bazaar may be right at a Kansas ice-cream social.

Such true tolerance is far broader than the limits of professing

Christianity, than the limits of any established, cut-and-dried creed.

It is as broad as the Seven Holy Rivers of Hindustan and as vast as

Time. The creed of mutual sympathy is a very old creed: even amongst

the troglodytes chosen spirits must have known it, the red-haired

barbarians of Gaul must have heard of it, and amongst the

lizard-eating Arabs of pre-Islamic days it must have found adherents.

It is a human truth, a human principle which is the common property of

mankind East and West; but Christian hegemony in worldly affairs has

killed it, has blighted it with the curse of the cross.

Intrinsic unselfishness and abstract goodness is older than the

Gospel, the Koran, the Veda, or any other religious book. Being at the

very core of that civilization from which all changes spring, it is in

itself eternally unchangeable, be it clothed in the words of the

Sermon on the Mount, the Prophet Mohammed’s three great principles of

Compassion, Charity, and Resignation, or the famed edict of the

Emperor Asoka, who many centuries before the days of Jesus declared to

the world that “a man must not do reverence to his own sect by

disparaging that of another man.”